Well, it seems like I’m not an entirely hopeless case. I got a request today from one of the schools to which I applied for a writing sample. Seems they’ve done their initial review of applications after last week’s deadline, and they liked my cover letter and CV well enough to want to read part [...]
Archive for November, 2008
Cautious optimism
Posted in acamademia, dissertation, tagged acamademia, dissertating on 25 November 2008 | 1 Comment »
The Santa who gave Christmas the finger
Posted in diversion, tagged bad Santa on 24 November 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I wish I knew how to save banner ads. There’s one currently atop the Dnes website depicting a Santa giving you the bird.
Apparently this is hawking the services of some credit company, though it’s a bit foggy how it’s doing that. There’s text that asks, “Does he want to ruin your Christmas?” Then it exhorts [...]
Breaking News: Fox News to become fairer and balanceder
Posted in Ejection '08, tagged Fox Moos on 24 November 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Alan Colmes (who? exactly) is leaving as the longtime nominally liberal punching bag for Sean Hannity on Fox News’ long-running “Hannity and Colmes” program. Colmes will remain with the network. It remains TBD if Fox News will seek a new liberal for “Hannity and LTBD.”
Here are some thoughts on how Fox News might repackage the [...]
Triple A, double S
Posted in acamademia, tagged acamademia on 23 November 2008 | 1 Comment »
Did you know that among his many achievements, Ben Franklin invented the area code? It’s true. I made that fact up personally yesterday.
This weekend was my first AAASS conference, the big to-do for anyone who studies Eastern Europe. I gave a presentation (it would be fudging things a bit much to call it a real [...]
Not what we had in mind by ‘battle’
Posted in send in the Slavs, tagged riot, Velvet Revolution on 17 November 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Today, 17 November, is a state holiday in the Czech Republic and Slovakia, commemorating the beginning of the Velvet Revolution.
On this date in 1989, Communist riot police brutally broke up a peaceful demonstration (one that even received grudging official sanction) through the center of Prague to commemorate the murder of Jan Opletal, a Czech student [...]
Some of our data may be bollocks
Posted in diversion, tagged damn lies, lies, statistics on 15 November 2008 | Leave a Comment »
I’m no expert when it comes to investing, mortgages and other such elements of finance, but I have to suspect this was a bit dubious.
I just saw a commercial sponsored by some realtors association encouraging people to use a realtor for buying a new home, which counseled the wisdom of buying a house as an [...]
Vote for Obama, take communion, go to hell
Posted in Ejection '08, tagged American exegesis, ex-Jesus on 14 November 2008 | 1 Comment »
So says a priest down in Colbert country, who told his South Carolina parishioners supporting Obama and voting for him “constitutes material cooperation with intrinsic evil.”
Why the risk of eternal damnation? According to Father Jay Scott Newman, it’s because Obama is “the most radical pro-abortion politician ever to serve in the United States Senate or [...]
The good, the bad, and the unwritten
Posted in acamademia, dissertation, procrastination, tagged academic blues, acamademia on 12 November 2008 | Leave a Comment »
The good news: I got an e-mail from my adviser this afternoon from a historian who is well respect in the East-Central Europe field, someone who has put out a couple of books I own, and who is, in the words of my adviser, “a good person in the field to impress.” This historian isn’t [...]
Ramping back up
Posted in acamademia, dissertation, tagged academic blues, dissertating on 12 November 2008 | 1 Comment »
It’s been a month, or more, since I last wrote anything for my dissertation. The gap isn’t terribly surprising, though perhaps a bit longer than I’d hoped, since I’ve had other things to tend to in the meantime, like applying for jobs and putting together a presentation I’m giving at a conference next week (all [...]
Ruminations
Posted in Ejection '08, dissertation, tagged Joe the fifteen-minute wonder, rimshot on 9 November 2008 | Leave a Comment »
Our kitchen sink began draining slowly, then not at all, while I rinsed our dinner dishes tonight, and the garbage disposal didn’t sound like it was doing its job, so I got to broaden my expertise in amateur plumbing (previously limited to unclogging toilets and shutting off the local water supply to prevent overflows) with [...]
